ORLANDO, Fla. – Tivoli isn’t being Mickey Mouse about the burgeoning software market.
Within earshot of Disney World, the IBM subsidiary announced new storage management tools based on the technology of summer acquisition
of Chicago-based TrelliSoft.
Vice-president of storage management Laura Sanders said the acquisition has helped clear up the “”confusion factor”” about Tivoli’s place in the storage management business. “”We are definitely at: ‘It’s middleware, it’s another piece of software management and we’re going to take it very, very seriously,’”” she said at the Gartner Symposium ITXPO conference.
The market is moving from hardware storage solutions to software, she added – and storage revenues are following suit. She stressed that Austin, Tex.-based Tivoli is focusing on cross-platform capability, autonomic computing (self-regulating, self-healing systems) and integration management for its storage solutions.
Tivoli released Storage Resource Manager (SRM) Monday, a product previously under the purview of TrelliSoft. Tivoli’s initial release of SRM isn’t markedly different from what TrelliSoft was working on, said Sanders. “”Our goal was to get it out in our channel and make sure it’s integrated into our other products . . . Storage management and systems management make a lot of sense together.””
To that end, former TrelliSoft CEO Stephen Donovan has joined Tivoli as vice-president of integration.
SRM’s autonomic features include file system extension to allocate storage resources as needed; file sweep to automatically archive or delete data once a predetermined threshold is reached; and file migration to move data out of the storage pool to tape or another server based on specified criteria.
Autonomic computing has become the Tivoli mantra and the manner in which the company is trying to distinguish itself from the competition. In June, at its Planet Tivoli conference, held in Washington, D.C., the company announced point releases to further its development in autonomics.
“”We’ve defined the (five) phases of autonomic computing. If we go back a year ago, we were probably at level two. . . . In June we were at 2.5. I think today we’re at level three or four (out of five),”” said vice-president of security products Arvind Krishna. “”This is a big step forward we have made with this latest round of announcements. (But) I’m not saying we’re at the top yet. We’ve got a long, long way to go.””
Tivoli also released Identity Manager at ITXPO — a product based on technology from another summer acquisition, Access360. “”This is not a new strategy by an acceleration of our strategy by about two years,”” said Krishna. A federated identity management product may follow, he added, which would allow enterprises to extend identity privileges to customers and partners outside the organization.
Also new to the Tivoli portfolio is Privacy Manager. The product was influenced by a customer council comprised of health care, transportation, hospitality and government organizations. Protection of directory servers and portals were at the top of the list, according to Krishna.
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